


Two Photographs

by musamihi



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-07 13:17:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5457818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forty years apart, Peggy Carter gives two very different men two very different pieces of advice - but history will repeat itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Photographs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lampsprite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lampsprite/gifts).



> Happy holidays, Lampsprite! I wrote this for one of your short prompts – _Aunt Peggy_ – which made me want to look at her influence on Tony in his youth, and the pieces of her he still carries around with him. I hope you enjoy it!

_Christmastime, Cambridge. 1986._

The car, black and broad, glinted into the driveway of the little house on Salem Street. The driver’s door swung open, slick and noiseless; and the driver creaked out, a tall man, straight-backed and stiff and silver. His breath clouded around him as he fumbled a large, flat box out of the back seat. It was very cold, but the night was faintly golden, lit by the reflection in the low-wrapped clouds of the city lying across the river – and he paused at the bottom of the house’s front steps to look up, perhaps anticipating snow.

A light came on in the upstairs window: violently blue. He sighed and went in.

Threading past a box overflowing with tape drives, a congregation of plants clustered around a muted miniature television showing _My Sister Sam_ , and what appeared to be the bones of some massive fan, he deposited the box on the kitchen table. The clatter and thump coming from the upper level seemed to indicate he would not, in fact, have to climb the stairs, for which he was grateful.

“Morning,” came the voice from the bedroom, muffled and thick.

“Did I wake you? My apologies.” Jarvis checked his watch – pointedly, though there was no one to see. 7:57 P.M. “One doesn’t like to call ahead at such uncivilized hours.”

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Please, take your time.”

It was less than a minute. Tony came tumbling down the narrow stairs, crouching in the dark at the landing to root through a pile of shoes. Jarvis helpfully switched on the hall light (a blessedly mundane yellow) to see him lacing up a mismatched pair of high tops, one red, one teal. “Have you got the wrong ones, perhaps?”

“Nope.”

“No – no. We wouldn’t want to stifle innovation.” He looked as though he was considering stifling it in its sleep with a pillow, but he said nothing, and his face softened toward a smile when the boy stood up. He smoothed his hands over the shoulders of his jacket (a Donegal tweed that resembled nothing so much as static on a screen) and plucked a fold out of his collar. “This is lovely. You look very academic.”

“Oh, god.” Tony’s mouth pulled to one side in cartoonish distress, and he tried to duck toward the kitchen – but sleep made him clumsy, and he only broke away after Jarvis had drawn up the noose of his tie. He picked up a little speed, however, at the sight of that box, and he found enough dexterity to get his hand under the lid and the first layer of parchment paper before Jarvis snagged him by the yoke of his very academic jacket and thrust him toward the coat tree.

“Those are for dessert.”

“But I’m _starving_ –“

“Are you? Then I have excellent news: Maison Robert serves food. Bundle up. It’s hideous outside.”

“How about,” Tony said, hanging his overcoat artfully over his shoulders without actually engaging the sleeves, “how about: just one. Come on. I haven’t had breakfast.”

“When I bring you back after dinner, we’ll have as many as you like. And you can tell me all about those fire hazards you’re keeping by the stove – I _said_ after dinner!”

Tony had slipped away into the kitchen again; he whirled on his heel, threw up his hands, and backed slowly toward the refrigerator. “I’m getting a soda, Jesus. Stand down.” He dragged open the crisper drawer, pulled out two cans of Tab, and stuffed them in his pockets, shifting a dog-eared copy of some novel to fit them in. As he was marching out the door Jarvis held for him, he added: “And it’s only a fire hazard if you turn the stove _on_.”

“I offer thanks every day that I’m surrounded by such clever people.” Jarvis shut the door, and hurried as much as prudence would allow across the ice-littered drive. “What I would do without you, I don’t know. No, get in the back. We’re picking up Ms. Carter on the way.”

And off they went, through the orderly but unforgiving traffic grid of Cambridgeport – and by the time they broke free onto Mass Ave, Jarvis’s gentle prying into some of the other oddments he’d noticed littering the house had resulted in a steady prattle about flywheels, damping, CARES, translational and angular models, system symmetries, model-based compensators, linear quadratic regulators and the infuriating minutiae of getting one’s thesis typed. His responses ( _mm_ , _ah_ , _no, I don’t see at all, but please continue_ ) masked a carefully-guarded pleasure, visible only in the flashes the passing streetlamps threw across the windshield.

The torrent paused when they pulled up outside a cheerily lit home on Story Street, where a woman was already stepping out onto the stair, a severe black silhouette in a long sleek coat. Tony lounged between the two front seats, one elbow propped on either side, and watched as Jarvis met her a few paces in front of the car. Their smiles leapt out briefly in the headlights, pleased and discreet, then broad and even, strangely similar. The foot or so between them seemed comfortable, somehow, the way he bent into it like an old tree. And then he was opening the door for her, and she was shuffling in, a heap of wool and gloves and just a little fur and a gleaming square handbag. 

She turned her face as the dome light clicked off to give a tighter, more appraising smile to the young man looming beside her shoulder. “Merry Christmas, Tony.”

“So far so good,” he replied, with the studied shrug and the crooked grin of someone who had recently leaped the black chasm of terror in his heart to describe a girl as _pretty great_ – someone who was, perhaps, quietly fearful that his growth spurt would soon become a subject of conversation. But she was kind; Jarvis slid in behind the wheel a moment later, shooed Tony back into his seat, and they took off together, heading south.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come before today,” Peggy said, folding her hands over one knee and fixing her eyes on Jarvis. “I would have liked to spend some time with you.”

“I expect to have some free time in the morning before we start back for New York – we might meet for breakfast. Assuming you get up before Mr. Stark.”

“Oh – yes, lovely. Lunch, perhaps.”

“You should come to dinner, J,” Tony said, reclined against the window, watching the Harvard gates float by under his reflection. “Tell dad to get with the times. You know, you’re not the means to any end others may wish to accomplish, you’re not a tool for his use, you’re not a servant to his needs, you’re not –“

“Oh, yes, Mr. Jarvis,” Peggy said, her eyebrows shooting up and her mouth pinching down on a smile, “ _do_.”

“– You’re a man, and the miracle of you is yours to own and –“

“Good god.” Jarvis’s eyes made a very rare trip from the road into the rearview mirror, utterly aghast. “What on _earth_ do they have you reading?”

“Who’s _they_? It’s not required. I don’t just read books when they’re –“

“Then I advise you to stop at _once._ ” Jarvis squared his shoulders and adjusted his grip on the wheel like a man shaking off a chill. “The miracle of –“ The words seemed to stick in his throat; he could only scoff. “Really.” A very slight shake in Peggy’s shoulders drew his eye, and he sniffed. “I was just getting the latest on our resident scholar’s final project. Perhaps I could hear the rest of it.”

“Oh, it’s a breeze.” Tony obliged, stretching his legs out across the back seat and falling once again into a stream of only slightly labored swagger, touching on his advisor’s various international accolades, the ambition of his work, the surprising ease with which he’d blown through all his courses, the incredulity his professors had expressed at the sophistication of his questions. On and on he went, through Central Square, back past MIT; and then he slowed, as they crept through traffic toward the river; he faltered on the bridge, over the black line of the Charles.

And in Boston, he was silent. 

The last mile of the drive crawled, a zig-zag through downtown that took twice as long as it should have. But when they arrived, stopping on the cramped little hill beneath King’s Chapel, Tony looked up as though surprised to be there quite so soon. He climbed out of the car, facing the slate courtyard (flat and empty in the winter, the spruce and red ribbon decorations not quite enough to disguise the absence of the summer’s café tables) of Maison Robert. He stuck his hands in his pockets and pretended not to see the pair of figures just now rounding the corner.

Moments later, they were on him. First his mother, with a hug that was both too tight and too quick, as though she were afraid she might break him; then his father, with a touch between his shoulder blades like a hand on a rudder. There was a flurry of _Merry Christmases_. There was an embrace between Peggy and Howard – who let loose a lash of a smile that made Tony shift his weight and look away as though he’d seen something alien and naked. And then they were crossing the courtyard, Peggy having inserted her arm into Tony’s with a practiced little hook and twist – and the car was nothing but a plume of exhaust disappearing behind a truck when Tony turned back under the restaurant’s yellow awning to wave goodbye.

Through drinks and bread and soup, Peggy and Howard talked like old soldiers, and the table’s other occupants traded quiet inanities about the food and the weather – cheerful enough, apparently quite content to be left out of the fray. There was something in Maria’s upright posture, in the way she crept always to the edge of her seat, in the way she kept her hand on the stem of her glass, that suggested a desire to flee, or perhaps an urgent suspicion that something sinister hung just behind her shoulder; and there was something in the way that Tony avoided her eyes that said he found it faintly embarrassing. Still, when she got up to wander to the back of the restaurant with Peggy, he watched her go like she was the last train of the night, leaving him stranded on the platform.

Howard drank. Tony eyed the half-empty bottle of red wine (number two for the night) with nothing short of jealous loathing.

“How’s school?”

“Good.”

A long beat; another table burst into laughter.

“Good?”

Tony set his fork down on his plate, grudgingly slowly. “I’m finishing up my design thesis.”

“And?”

 _And_ \- Tony started on a dry, unenthusiastic rehearsal of rotor system analysis; magnetic suspension; synchronous response, non-synchronous stability. He might have been reading an abstract. Every word seemed to cost him something, to scrape out of his mouth by some will other than his own. But across the table – unseen, fixed as Tony’s eyes were on the edge of his own plate – Howard relaxed. His shoulders loosened, the set of his face eased and opened. He leaned forward; his elbow rested on the table, and while he didn’t smile, his eyes were keen.

“The real connection, you know - the real heart of the problem - is in fitting it all into a wave-behavioral framework. If you can interpret it that way – that’s where you need to go.”

Tony didn’t look up, but his brows twitched together, ever so briefly, into a frown. The muscles in his shoulders worked for a second, like he was trying to shrug, or throw off some weight – but sank again a moment later. “Thanks, dad.”

Howard looked like someone had shut a door in his face: affronted, frustrated, but above all – surprised. He reared back in his chair a little. “ _Thanks_?”

Just then, Peggy’s hands appeared on the back of Howard’s chair. She leaned in to speak, her voice low beside his ear. Something dark passed over his face, and in their muted conversation the word _paranoid_ floated to the surface, familiar, hushed, and sympathetic. After some hissed back and forth, Howard dropped his napkin on the table, pushed his chair back, and stood. “All right. I’ll have Jarvis take her back to the hotel.”

The speed with which Jarvis arrived might have raised the suspicion that this was not an unheard of turn of events; the heavy fatigue on Howard’s face as he told him _stick around with her until I get back – I’ll be late_ would certainly have confirmed it. Tony let it all slip by in his periphery, focused so tightly and with such intense, calculated apathy on a half-eaten potato that nothing seemed to raise his attention at all until Jarvis’s hand dropped onto his shoulder.

“Have a pie for me, then,” Jarvis said, with just a dash of regret. Tony shrugged and tipped his head back to give him a smile, and didn’t watch him leave.

Maria’s spot was cleared; the meal trundled on, but not for long. “Well,” Peggy said, rueful but unapologetic, “I should be going, I suppose. My friend has an early bedtime; I told her I wouldn’t keep her up waiting.”

“I’ll have them call you a car.”

“No, actually, I think I’d like to walk.” She turned to Tony, her chin propped in her hands. “We’re going the same way. I’m sure Tony will get me as far as Pearl Street.”

Tony stared at her. “You want to _walk_ to Harvard Square? – All right! It’s fine,” he rushed to add, wanting nothing to do with the martial edge that had just appeared in his father’s face. “Sure, why not. I’ll walk with you. Let’s get out of here.“

The goodbyes were perfunctory. They left Howard behind them, alone at the table, raising his arm for the waiter.

They walked, hunched against the cold, along the curve of Cambridge Street toward the bridge. The buildings sheltered them from the wind for now, and the cars on the street had dwindled almost to none – a sure sign of a storm on the way. The silence was strange, for the center of a city. Peggy kicked a question into it now and then.

“Are you liking it here, then?”

“It’s fine.”

“Do you see them very often?”

“My parents? No.”

“They seemed very pleased to see you.”

Tony, whose nose for condescension was tuned as finely as any sixteen year-old’s, shot her a look. “He seemed a hell of a lot more excited to see _you_.”

Her hesitation was uncomfortable, which was without a doubt what he’d intended. She was silent for a few paces before forming her reply: “He’s not responsible for me.”

“Whatever.” The word was too quick, too cold and clipped to be anything but an automatic response, something he’d flung in the face of any number of explanations and excuses. The stairs to Longfellow Bridge, slick and poorly lit, provided a welcome distraction.

Her mouth tightened, poised to say something – and then relaxed again, as she thought better of it - and opened, as they stepped out onto the bridge, when she thought _again_. “You know, the – the special friend we had in common –“

“Oh, my _god_ ,” Tony burst out, looking around him in horror, as though considering pitching himself into the river to escape. “Your _special friend_?”

“ _Don’t be an ass._ ” She clacked alongside him, flustered; their pace had increased to something almost frenetic. “Listen to me. You know his loss was – unexpected. Untimely. It was difficult. There wasn’t time to prepare. I wish, before he’d gone, that I’d had time to – come to peace, maybe, with what he was for me. It would have been easier. I would have spent less time afterward struggling with what he wasn’t, and –“

“You know, if I wanted someone to talk my ear off about Captain America, I actually could have just –“

“And _don’t interrupt_. I’m not …” Her hands clenched in her pockets. Below them, the wind shot under the bridge, out along the dark ice of the river and into the bay. When she spoke again, her voice was more measured, almost too gentle. “When you’re losing someone – when you know you’re losing them, the best thing you can do is to let go. While you can. For both of you. And that way, when they’re gone, you’ll have the best of them. You’ll have what they gave you, and you won’t waste precious time agonizing over what it is you’ve missed. Do you understand?”

If he did, he gave no indication. His face was shut, surly, focused on the sidewalk. For the rest of the walk, he said nothing.

They parted ways at Pearl Street; before he could stalk off toward home, her hand shot out. “Do you mind if I borrow your book?”

“What?”

“Your book.” Her hand dipped neatly into the pocket of his coat to fish it out. “I’d like to read it.”

“You can get it anywhere, it’s not a –“

“Oh, good. It’s quite short. I’m leaving town in the afternoon,” she pressed on, through gritted teeth, “but I’ll be sure to have Mr. Jarvis drop it off for you tomorrow morning.”

Realization broke across his forehead; he ducked his chin to his chest, an embarrassed half-nod. “Sure.” He swallowed something back. “Yeah, you can borrow it.”

“Thank you,” she said, stuffing it into her handbag without so much as looking at the title. “Merry Christmas, Tony.”

“See you later.”

That gesture, he understood. But it wasn’t until years later, when he was suddenly buried under condolences full of words like _unexpected_ , _untimely_ , _difficult_ , _loss_ , when he found himself struggling against every heap of earth thrown over those graves, bitter at the pointless absence they left behind – it wasn’t until then that he understood that she hadn’t been talking about Steve Rogers at all.

And then, of course, it was too late to take her advice. He never quite remembered to be grateful.

* * *

_Springtime, Washington, D.C. 2014._

In the brass of the elevator, Tony’s reflection was dented and smudged - a rare imperfection in a city that prided itself on its polish, and where everything was new enough to be unblemished. He wasn’t giving it very much to work with, to be fair. His tie was askew. His jacket was draped over one shoulder, a useless protest against the all-encompassing heat that could make a cotton shirt feel as unbearably heavy as an overcoat. The humidity had taken its toll on every part of him, and the omnipresent blasting air conditioning was providing less of a relief than the clammy feeling that came from being put away wet. There was a bottle in his hand. It was, to his credit, unopened.

The glasses he’d left in his wake at dinner were debits against that same account, perhaps. But he was still in the black. When the doors opened to the ninth floor, he made his way steadily to the room at the end of the hall, and he knocked in perfect, syncopated rhythm - and knocked, and knocked - never missing a beat - until the door opened. 

A little, at least.

Through that stingy, foot-wide opening, Steve regarded him with the same look he’d worn all day - was currently wearing on any number of television screens - would wear _in perpetuam_ , in footage of the day’s interviews, testimony, commentary. It was hard, almost brittle; his jaw was set, his face was calm, his mouth turned ever so slightly downward. His eyes were full of the kind of numb, inchoate anger that in anyone else would have signified: _drunk_.

“I’m not looking for company,” he said, even, just a hint of a ragged edge fraying off his usual politeness.

“Yeah, neither am I.” Tony set his palm flat on the door and leaned. “I’m looking for you.”

Steve started pushing the door shut.

“Hey, come on - come _on_.” Tony slid his hand to grip the edge of the door; that Steve wouldn’t actually break his fingers didn’t seem like too much of a gamble, although it wasn’t quite a sure bet. “I’ve had a really rough day.”

“ _You’ve_ had a rough day.” The resistance behind the door disappeared, and Tony went tumbling in, catching himself on the handle; Steve, a shadow against the desk lamp, the only light he’d switched on in the room, retreated toward the chair by the window. The view, as in most Washington hotels, could pretty easily have been beaten. Past a dorm, a section of freeway, and a sliver of the Kennedy Center’s glowing marble, there was a small wedge of river - which must have been flowing, but under the anemic lights of the Georgetown waterfront looked as stagnant as the rest of the city. The ruin that lay just to the west, collapsed across the squat and headless foundations of the bridge to Rosslyn, was obscured by the wall. “I’ve been in the hot seat since eight o’clock in the morning.”

“Oh, were you not enjoying yourself?” Tony nudged the door shut behind him and followed him in, dropping his jacket on the desk and his bottle on the bed, making himself thoroughly at home. “I couldn’t tell.”

Steve swiveled to look at him, arms tight across his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said, lifting his eyebrows as his voice scraped the bottom of the register of sarcasm, “so - you’re here to tell me I should have been more _tactful_?”

“No! I’m here to …” It was so obvious to him; a bottle and an in-person visit were the height of consideration. He gestured, vaguely, indicating nothing in particular but the space directly in front of him. “I’m here to help.”

That didn’t produce the softening, the outpouring of gratitude he somehow always hoped - expected - that it would; and, of course, it was only half true. He was looking for company. The old adage about misery was perfectly accurate. The things that had collapsed around them in the past few months had brought tumbling with them to the ground some very old scaffolding, decades of carefully constructed towers hoisting up his comfortably aloof relationship with certain pieces of his past - and they’d ripped open some fresher wounds, too. He was doing his very best not to dwell on all the things that it might mean for him, this seismic shift in how he read the lives and work of a couple people whose shadows he still walked in, because he’d been so happy to think he’d closed that book for good - how better to stave off the inevitable confrontation of his own unhappiness than to come find the man for whom it was probably even worse?

Of course, as so often happened, in the harsh light of the present moment the execution of his ideas lacked some of the easy shine they’d had in his imagination. Steve’s eyes dropped with an eloquent mix of contempt and irony to the bottle on the bed, and he turned again to look out the window at nothing, so rigid, so coiled, so full of - what? Tony couldn’t read it. Not that he thought his emotional literacy was exactly above grade-level, but he was good enough, he was savvy enough, to infer from surrounding circumstances what people were probably feeling. … Usually. If he tried hard enough. This was anger and this was grief, and those were perfectly understandable - no one liked to look behind them and realize the place they’d come from wasn’t what it seemed. He knew that. No one liked to work like hell to patch a bleeding wound only to find they’d been ripping the bandages off another gash. He knew that, too. No one liked to have to take a good hard look at the people who’d made you what you were, and -

Okay, no. Table that. Try again later. Misery loved company, but misery wanted to keep a couple things to himself for a while. As much as Tony would sometimes have liked to pawn him off to the next person who decided to call him a _luminary_ , Howard wasn’t really for sharing.

He grabbed the bottle, and flipped a glass from where it sat upside down in its little paper tray.

Steve was angry, Steve was grieving. But there was also something restless in him, Tony thought, that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, that he couldn’t understand. He might not have been able to name it, but it felt familiar. And he knew how to treat it, at least as far as his own condition was concerned.

With infinitely more confidence than he felt, he sauntered up to stand beside Steve, glass in hand. He set the bottle on the windowsill. The water in the distance gleamed with a certain dim, familiar glare - he was reminded of streetlights on glass, on perfect, polished black. “You have to …” He struggled for the words - or, more precisely, resisted them. He knew what they were. They just sounded inadequate. “You have to let go of things.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Steve’s eyes shut; the gentle downslope of his chest hinted at a controlled exhalation. “ _What_?”

Tony drank. “Someone told me once - you know, when you’re losing something, when you know it’s gone. You have to just - let it be what it is.”

This time, Steve turned on his heel to face him, leaving his profile in the window. Tony resisted the urge to square to him, just focusing on the shape he made there on the glass, the way his dark T-shirt blended into the night beyond and was occasionally run through with the gold stripe of a pair of headlights; he was aware, in a rough sort of way, that he wasn’t really getting his point across.

“If there’s something you want to talk about,” Steve said, so deliberately Tony could feel him measuring his patience out in millimeters, “you should probably just get down to it. Because I am _really_ tired.”

“I _am_ talking, if you’d just - will you listen to me? When you lose things - this shit.” He swept his hand out toward the window, the river, the graveyard of Project Insight and a whole lot more. “We just lost a whole - two generation’s worth of progress. And you’re pissed off. I get it. I’ve been there. But what I’m saying is, it’s better to let it go now. Because it’s gone. And when you lose things, they never come back -”

Steve’s hand shot out - the bottle shattered against the wall in a violent constellation of glass and golden liquid. The volatile, wooden smell of whiskey exploded into the room.

Tony stared; looked down at his drink; and drained it in one go, before jabbing his empty glass at the mess sliding down into the carpet. “And there’s a case in _fucking_ point.” 

Steve was looming up beside him now, all but shoving his finger in his face. “You don’t know a damn thing about what I’ve lost -”

“Yeah, I know, you’re really special -”

“- But I have lost a _lot_ of time.” There was a pause, and it was heavy; more of a lacuna, perhaps. Something empty where something else should have been. Through some miraculous feat of self-control, Tony did not use it to explain how time worked. “And if you think things don’t come back …” He raised his hand out toward the river; raised it another inch, as though to point to something that was no longer there; and let it drop. “You haven’t been paying attention.”

Tony pressed his lips into a flat line, a grim, humorless smile. “Well. That’s different.” He spun his glass in his hand. “Things come back all the time, to bite you in the ass. But you can’t _fix_ shit. Take it from me - you can try, and you can try again, and you can keep digging your way out of that hole, and the only thing that happens is you plow straight into a gas main.” He spread his arms: a magician at the end of a truly wretched act. “You just keep getting fucked.” He hadn’t come here to say this - he’d come here to offer some advice, to try to pay it forward, to give someone a chance that he’d been given to avoid some pain, a chance he’d turned down without really knowing what it was. But maybe this was the same advice. Maybe the course Peggy had tried so kindly to set for him on that miserable night in Cambridge had been colder than he’d understood. Make your peace with the end before it comes - because it is coming. Take what you can get before the flood washes it all away, because there will be a flood, and you can only save yourself.

There was a flicker across Steve’s face of - something; he looked, for a fraction of a second, like he was a little taken aback. But whatever had softened hardened up again (if not quite as steadily - Tony had finally come to recognize the little fault lines in his face that betrayed the fact that he was stubborn, but not a complete moron), and he stepped back to turn his gaze out the window again, only wincing slightly when his weight shifted into that field of broken glass. “I’m sure it would be easier to believe that, wouldn’t it.”

 _Easier_ was the word that did it; Tony turned abruptly to set his glass on the desk, and - intending to take his own advice for once - decided to cut his losses. “Yeah. Easy. You’re right. You know what, if you want to hang out here and brood, you just go right ahead.” He started for the door. “Have a great night, and don’t worry about the -”

Steve’s hand shot out to grab him by the arm. Tony looked down at where his fingers were curled into the already abused fabric of his shirt, and raised his eyes to him again, dust dry. “Did you get _any_ of that, about letting go?”

Steve’s mouth twisted. “Don’t be an ass.”

Tony laughed before he could stop himself. “Don’t hold your breath.” But he _had_ learned something since that night, hadn’t he; maybe it was just defeat, just resignation to the relentlessness of the forces that struck constantly against him, but anger was no longer his vice. It didn’t sit curled on his shoulder the way it once had, the way it probably did, if he was being honest, with the majority of people under the age of eighteen - it had flown away some time ago, and left in its place a vacancy he was still trying to fill.

He hadn’t figured out how. He wasn’t sure he ever would. But there were patches and palliatives, there were things that felt good and took up enough room to stop the wind from whistling through the cracks. He stepped back toward the window, giving his arm a shake - and Steve dropped it, slow, reluctant. 

“Let’s start over,” Tony said, setting his hand at Steve’s elbow and guiding him away from the broken bottle. His hand slid up his arm, the tips of his fingers slipping under his sleeve. “I am looking for company.”

Steve froze. His eyes flashed to the glass on the desk. “You’re drunk.”

“No,” Tony said, all plodding patience, jerking his head back toward where the whiskey had met its end. “You kind of put a lid on that, pal. So, are you going to help me, or not?” He slid his hand down the length of his arm, curling it around his wrist. “Because I honestly - don’t have a lot of other places to be right now.”

It was, to put it mildly, an understatement - he saw Steve pick it up and examine it, he saw the glint of recognition in his face. No doubt Steve spotted the bait for what it was, too - _help me_ \- and when he took it, when he pushed his hand back through Tony’s hair in one coarse swipe (subtlety - not really his bag), Tony wasn’t sure whether he should be pleased with himself for imparting this piece of wisdom, for sharing the counsel of someone who, when she had given it, had for all he knew been entering the last phase of a hard, sleepless, and perhaps thwarted life. But he thought it likely to be an improvement. 

And he thought it felt nice. He’d tried not to think much further ahead than that, a long time ago.

Some time afterward - an hour, maybe - he felt Steve’s weight shifting along the mattress. When he opened his eyes, he saw Steve, sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes fixed on the window. From this angle, Tony couldn’t tell what he was looking at; there was nothing out there that he could see. Just a waning moon, a few stars that had managed to fight their way through Washington’s rampant light pollution, and a police car, stopped on the highway below, its spinning lights casting the room on and off, on and off, into a dim and muted blue.

* * *

_[CLASSIFIED], [CLASSIFIED], 1943._

On a rocky hill, among patches of white, dry grass and gnarled-looking brush, a man and a woman sat together. The night was bright - there was a large moon, low and lazy in the sky over the little town tucked into the meandering valleys at their feet - and every few moments, a burst of copper green or pomegranate pink flashed across their faces. The fireworks were low, unwieldy, slapdash affairs, never rising to a height of more than ten feet before they popped and scattered, sparking over the heads of a flock of delighted children, and, judging by the shrieks and shouts and laughs echoing up the hillsides, they were all the more thrilling for it.

An old woman - perhaps a grandmother - stood on the sidelines, snapping pictures with a boxy camera. Her grin stretched across the visible third of her face, and her fingers wrapped carefully, securely around the camera with evident reverence - with obvious pleasure.

“I don’t think she’ll get a whole lot, in this light,” Steve said, a shallow note of regret in his voice. There was half a smile pulling constantly at his mouth, threatening to tumble center-stage.

“Perhaps she’ll get lucky.” Peggy was resting back on the heels of her palms, her arms a perfect, inverted _V_. “She might catch one of those fireworks at the right moment.”

“She might.” A golden column of sparks shot upward, fanning out like a potted palm. “More likely someone’ll catch one in the face.”

“Would you like to go tell them they ought to stop? Give a very important lesson on fire hazards?”

“I really wouldn’t.” With a quick, covert glance in her direction, he settled back to lean on his hands, mirroring her posture; but he was rather taller, and the harsh realities of trigonometry prevented him from falling into place beside her. He shifted, digging one heel into the dirt like a man who would rather be walking. “It seems like a lot of film to waste - for a 'maybe.' Not exactly cheap.”

“It is - you’re right.” Her smile, which had been teasing, softened a little as she looked out once again over the scene before them. “I understand the urge, though. To try to keep something wonderful from slipping away.”

“This happens every year.”

“Maybe. Maybe not, for her.” Peggy shrugged. “Maybe not for any of them. You know that as well as I do - and so does she, I’m certain.”

Steve stared past the toes of his boots. Down the hill, a group of children ran back and forth across a little plank bridge that spanned a creek - back and forth, back and forth. 

“When you have something good,” Steve said, holding his chin up with the dogged and bottomless certainty of a boy about to read something in front of the class he could only pray was correct, “you should hold onto it. For as long as you can.”

Peggy smiled. “Yes, I think that’s right.” Her fingers combed through a tuft of grass; the leaves broke apart in her hands like old, brittle hair. “We never know what tomorrow takes away, do we. But whatever it is - we always have what we keep for ourselves. Even if it’s just a moment, just - just a second. If you hold onto it, you’ll have it forever.”

Another pop - another flash - another hiss, as red and brilliant orange darted out into the air, and a drifting grey plume of smoke filled the emptiness it left. Steve dropped back to rest on his elbows. The ground was dry, hard, cool; the air was full of garrigue and the breeze from the sea and the sharp, dangerous tang of gunpowder; there was a three-quarter moon, and a great many of the stars were washed out, but Jupiter was bright. There was a church in the town, and its stubby tower was tiled in three rows. There were children laughing. There were women singing. A whistling, wailing firework spiraled over the crowd and erupted, painting everything in blue.

These were the kinds of things a man might hold on to, if he were hoping, one day, to remember.


End file.
